Don’t get too excited if you’re looking for noninvasive fat removal techniques here in the US, as this new zeltiq device for noninvasive fat removal on isolated parts of the body, called the Zeltiq device, has not yet been approved for such a thing here in the US yet.
This device is unique, as it doesn’t use radio waves, lasers, heat or any other sort of fat melting technique to get rid of fat cells, or allow your body to excrete them on their own like the other laser assisted fat removal techniques we discussed in our last post, but rather it uses cryogenics.
Yep, it uses the principle of freezing to kill fat cells, and then allow your body to get rid of these destroyed fat cells on it’s own. It’s a device that is held against the skin for a long time, allowing it to adequately freeze the fat cells, which can be a rather tedious process, and over a period of months of treatment, your body should dispel these fat cells from the body.
It can be a very long process, but the good thing is that it is completely noninvasive. No cutting, probing, tearing, or incisions. Zeltiq goes by the name of cool sculpting as well. I’m not sure if it is under review with the FDA for fat removal and sculpting use, but it sure will catch on if it works because a lot of people don’t like the idea of being cut to reduce fat with the traditional heat and suction techniques we have today.
What’s interesting is if you go to the Zeltiq site, it won’t even take you to a US page, it pops up a message that the procedure is not yet approved for fat removal in the US, but it is approved for dermatological procedures that involve cooling the skin and the layers below it.
The interesting part of this cool sculpting procedure is that it appears you only have to get one treatment that can last up to three hours (probably depending on what you’re getting treated), and then over the course of four months or so, your body actually eliminates the crystallized fat cells over this period of time.
I’m not sure why it takes this long, but it does. The results pictures on the website are pretty good, but they don’t look as dramatic as laser lipolysis. The cost as far as I can find is about $800-1,000 per body part treated. I could not tell whether this is a good procedure for any areas of the body other than abdomen, back fat, or bra jiggle fat, as those were consistently the only examples I could find. It looked like, per the before and after pictures, it might work a little bit to reduce the appearance of cellulite potentially.
